Love, Well

Love has seen you constipated.Everybody talks about love like it's Paris and poetry and fucking sunsets.Nobody tells you that eventually love is standing outside a bathroom door asking, How long are you gonna be?Or arguing at 6:17 on a Wednesday about a spoon in the sink.Except the spoon is not the spoon.The spoon is 2019. The spoon is your mother. The spoon is you never listen to me.Long-term love is unhinged.Love, Well is an intimate, funny and painfully recognisable exploration of what happens after falling in love, when two whole, complicated people have to work out how to keep choosing each other without disappearing themselves.Through ordinary domestic moments and the enormous histories hiding beneath them, Shaye Steinhardt explores intention and impact, resentment and repair, self-worth and devotion, and the difference between understanding somebody's wounds and allowing those wounds to keep hurting you.It is about the arguments nobody wins. The paper cuts that accumulate. The histories we drag into kitchens. The versions of ourselves our partners remember long after we have changed. And the strange, ordinary devotion of repeatedly crossing the room towards one another.Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes badly. Sometimes holding evidence. Sometimes holding toilet paper.This is not a prescription for perfect love. It is an honest examination of what it means to remain fully yourself while building a life beside another imperfect human being.Because maybe the question after all these years isn't simply: Do you love me?Maybe it's: Do you love me well?